How an Embittered Brit Decimated the Washington Post |
When Will Lewis arrived at the Washington Post in January 2024, he was received as a potential redeemer. The Post had lost $77 million the previous year under Lewis’s predecessor as publisher and CEO, Fred Ryan, an affable man about town who was once Ronald Reagan’s post-presidential chief of staff. “The state of the paper when Fred left was really bad,” says a senior staffer on the business side. “It was basically like two generational news cycles of Trump and COVID made the execs feel like they had a strategy and then the music stopped and subscribers fell away.” From its high of 3 million subscribers at the end of the first Trump administration, the Post was now down to 2.5 million, and half of its online audience had withered away from a peak in 2020. Owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, was looking for a leader to jolt the paper to life.
“He came in, and we were all onboard — It’s exciting; we need a refreshing change,” recalls a former senior newsroom staffer. Lewis had a certain swagger and a British accent. In those early months, he told Puck that it was time for the paper to reassert itself among the slew of competitors — Politico, Axios, Punchbowl News — that had crowded the Washington, D.C., media marketplace. “We’ve let the tanks come onto our lawn,” Lewis said. “We’ve let people invade our space, and it’s time to push back.” A former editor describes his arrival as “a relief after years of Fred’s French-cuffed leadership.”
“Will’s entry was actually really impressive,” a former Post executive tells me. “The Post gave away the paper for free to anyone with a .gov email address. A lot of things were incredibly frustrating in that era. Will came in and saw that right away.” Former executive editor Marty Baron had expanded the newsroom during the Trump bump, and his successor, Sally Buzbee, had hired around another 150 journalists, but it wasn’t clear how that newsroom muscle would be used to make money. “I guess they just assumed they’d get more advertising and traffic and subs, but that’s not the strategy that worked,” a business-side executive tells me. “The New York Times is succeeding because it has multiple revenue streams.”
Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch lieutenant who had edited Britain’s The Telegraph for three years and was publisher of The Wall Street Journal for six years, seemed to grasp the need for adopting a creative new business model while remaining respectful of the Post’s core journalistic mission. His first meeting with the newsroom, a couple months before he officially took the helm, came shortly after the company bought out 240 employees. “We’re not in a place that we want to be in, and we need to get to that place as fast as we can,” Lewis said in November 2023. He also assured the assembled journalists, “We’re not going to do it by cutting; we’re going to do it by growing.”
“At the outset, there wasn’t a lot of reason to dislike him,” recalls one current Post staffer. Every day he was firing off emails to reporters to compliment their coverage and making an effort to get to know them, which people appreciated. “He spent time with reporters at the holiday party,” the staffer says. “He was drinking low-end beer and relishing it and had this sort of Everyman approach.” One former business-side staffer remembers how Lewis “was charismatic, very high energy in a slightly manic way. While you’re talking to him, you can get a little swept up, and then afterward, if you try to recount what he said, you realize lots of words don’t really add up.”
It took less than six months for his relationship with the newsroom to fall apart. He was appalled that Post journalists were investigating accusations that he had helped Murdoch’s media empire cover up its involvement in Britain’s long-running phone-hacking scandal — accusations that he had denied. “That created basically a permanent wound,” the current staffer says. Lewis pushed out Buzbee and replaced her with Telegraph editor Robert Winnett — who quickly had to withdraw in response to reports about his involvement in the hacking scandal. Lewis then tapped Matt Murray, who had worked with him at the Journal, to be executive editor.
In a now-infamous town hall that June, journalists peppered Lewis with aggressive questions. “He suddenly flipped a switch,” recalls another current staffer. He was “slouched in a chair and looking disheveled,” snapping at decorated journalists, “People are not reading your stuff.”
“He had two settings: charming Brit and asshole Brit. And he quickly moved into the latter category,” a former Post staffer tells me. “He was just like, ‘Fuck the feelings of the newsroom,’” an executive at a rival media organization says. “He was just going to plow through and get his job done for his boss.”
The problem for Lewis, who did not respond to a request for an interview, is that he couldn’t do that, either. According to former and current Post employees on both the editorial and the business ends of the operation — who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation or losing their severance — Lewis became an isolated figure at the company over the next year and a half, adrift from the newsroom and its operations and unable to get other projects up and running. He ultimately became estranged from Bezos, who compounded Lewis’s problems by pulling the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, leading hundreds of thousands of outraged readers to cancel their subscriptions. In the fall of 2025, Bezos rejected Lewis’s latest proposals to shore up the company’s finances, the problem being Lewis’s plan “was not based on any data,” says a senior editor. “Bezos was like, ‘Well, why are you doing this?’ And I think there were no good answers.” Bezos, who did not respond to a request for comment, sent him back to the drawing board.
To no avail. By early February this year, Lewis was overseeing at least 300 job cuts, by some estimates nearly half the newsroom, and the same week was forced out by Bezos for his troubles, days after Lewis was spotted walking the red carpet at a Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco. In a little more than two years, Lewis had managed to decimate one of the country’s three major newspapers, which now has to find a way forward with a meager and demoralized staff. There were many reasons the Lewis era ended in debacle — a distracted and capricious owner, Lewis’s inability to follow through on his bullish promises, and the pressures of an industry chronically in a state of collapse — but the fundamental defect of his tenure may have been his poisoned relationship with the people he was tasked with working with. “We never got the newsroom onboard,” explains a senior business-side staffer. “Could Will have? Maybe, and that’s the big hypothetical. His attitude was ‘We’re just going to move and not worry about it.’ Clearly, that didn’t work.”
When Lewis embarked on his 2024 newsroom charm offensive, he was simultaneously constructing barriers around himself. He created a new executive team known as the Office of the CEO that acted as a superstructure for the organization: a phalanx of mostly British aides who surrounded him, including a chief of staff, a communications officer, an operations director, and an executive assistant. “The Post at heart is a parochial place,” a senior editor says. The former owners, the Graham family, “ran it as a very neighborly, small, suburban company.” Lewis, in contrast, “almost thought of himself as a movie mogul or media mogul.”
Lewis’s chief of staff, Eleanor Breen, wielded particular influence. “She sort of became his body woman,” says a former senior newsroom staffer, who describes Breen as “the greatest dresser in the history of the planet.” Upon his arrival, Lewis also recruited chief strategy officer Suzi Watford and chief growth officer Karl Wells, both of whom he’d worked with at Dow Jones. “These people became protectors of Will,” the staffer says.
“Most of those jobs were never posted,” says a former Post executive. “They were just plucked from their friendships. Almost all of those people had no ties to Washington politics, didn’t know the audience or the hometown.” A former Post journalist says, “They were such a tight little pod — something I initially thought was a positive about Will.”
The first strategy Lewis rolled out in 2024 was called “Say it, fix it, build it,” a turnaround project that included listening sessions — “say-it groups” — to identify problem areas and help Lewis learn the paper. In the spring of that year, he outlined his vision more formally in a town hall. He wanted to diversify the company’s revenue streams through additional subscription tiers for more premium readers and flexible payment options aimed at targeting “untapped audiences.” He also wanted to further integrate artificial intelligence into daily operations. “I really hope at some point in the future, when you look back on this day,” he told staffers, “it’s actually quite a significant day in the history of our company.” The Post would create a new team focused on marketing the paper’s star talents. A month later, after Buzbee’s departure, Lewis announced the formation of a “third newsroom,” a team focused on service journalism and social media.
Some of these initiatives worked. The “fix-it groups” were popular. “The Post had this byzantine structure that made no sense,” says a former Post executive. “The ‘fix-it groups’ gave us ideas to solve” structural issues as well as mundane problems like how to personalize the app. “For the change agents at the company, it was a fun and efficacious three months.” The flexible payment strategy was also effective.
But in his rare public comments to reporters, Lewis could give the impression of throwing a lot of stuff at the wall — talk of both personalization and scale, internal growth and outside acquisitions, local-news ventures and international reach — without knowing what it all amounted to. Within the Post, the rhetoric often didn’t correspond with practical reality. “Everyone was asking, ‘What is our strategy?’” says a former business-side executive. “And generically what we were given was to get 200 million paying users — which is not a strategy, that’s a vision.”
It didn’t help that Lewis’s rupture with the newsroom was mirrored by a near-simultaneous break with the business side. “He was asked some tough questions, and after that we largely stopped seeing him outside of quarterly business overviews,” says the executive. “He never really put himself back in front of the broader organization. It was conspicuous because the convergence of those moments — his withdrawal from exposure to the larger company and his decision to insulate himself within a smaller circle — created an environment where that group was focused primarily on pursuing his objectives, not all of which were clear to the supporting teams.”
Lewis also relied heavily on consultants, like a leadership guru named Peter Fuda, who last year held a series of tutorials about how managers should navigate a company in transition. “There was a period of time when, even for top leaders, Will would be there to introduce Peter Fuda — but the communication was coming from Peter Fuda,” a former Post editor remembers. Another consultant, Richard K. Clark, worked on a strategy called the “Plan on the Page,” which was aimed at attracting those 200 million paying users. “It was a PowerPoint slide but also kind of a chart, and all of the major departments, including news, were supposed to build their goals and strategies off this, ” the former editor recalls. But instead of Lewis giving a big presentation about the initiative, it fell to Watford and her team to “do a road show and share with the next layer down of senior leaders where the company was going,” the editor says. “That was the way Lewis operated. You could call it master delegation; in some ways, it felt like absence.”
Lewis had a penchant for alienating the rank and file. “The basic experience of running into Will in the elevator is he looks unwashed, unlaundered, unironed, unshaven,” an editor recalls. “Just doesn’t inspire confidence.” In the spring of 2025, Lewis had a series of one-on-one meetings with top reporters, during which he handed out copies of Jim Collins’s business self-help book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t and “proceeded to say nonsense words for an hour,” recalls one of the reporters, including proposing that they collectively publish 50 million to 100 million “story units” as part of a goal to reach 10 million readers a day. A reporter told colleagues afterward that they couldn’t even disagree with what Lewis had said because they didn’t understand it well enough to take a position.
Lewis was passionate about staffers returning to the office post-pandemic and felt he could lure them by opening a café within a portion of the ninth floor that the Post had recently acquired. “It looked like the Severed Floor but had an area we could clearly turn into a café. Will went really hard on this,” says a former senior newsroom staffer, noting that Lewis had the chief building operator explore the possibility. “It never happened. Obviously, it would have been an insane thing to spend our money on.”
Lewis’s energies were often directed toward projects that seemed to have little to do with the Post’s journalism. In some ways, his tenure could be described as one long overreaction to the company’s lack of non-news products. As one business-side executive said, “He was a guy who liked new things. Went into this job eyes wide open about the financial problems the company was facing and knew we needed to innovate.” This inclination dovetailed with Bezos’s preferences. “Jeff is susceptible to creative bells and whistles,” says an editor. “He wanted out-of-the-box proposals for making money.” Murray would tell people that he felt bad for Lewis’s team because they had “been tasked by Bezos to invent the future of news and that’s a tall order,” according to a former senior newsroom staffer.
The profound disjuncture between the news and business sides was particularly evident in Lewis’s obsession with artificial intelligence, a tool staff suspected he was using to write emails — suspicions he seemingly confirmed in October 2024. “As I continue to explore must-have AI tools, this week I used Letterly (an app that turns speech into text) to help write this note,” Lewis wrote to staff, summarizing how he’d spent the week: a meeting with Watford, a trip to New York to “speak to our super-smart chief advertising officer,” a conference he’d attended. “On my way back to DC to pick my daughter up from school, I enjoyed spending time reflecting on what it all means — and all the pieces that have to fit together for our journalism to reach as many people as possible.”
This fixation manifested in lackluster products like “Ask the Post AI,” a search tool that seemed to have no utility in the age of ChatGPT, and AI-personalized podcasts that allowed listeners to custom-design the topics and even the hosts but were rife with errors. Multiple staffers flagged such issues to the product side as the tool was being developed, “but they pushed it forward anyway,” says one of the staffers. “We had been fighting our whole Washington Post careers for them to understand that building trust came down to putting out our own people and building a platform around them,” says a former Post executive. Now, the Post was “skipping through real people and trying to do it with fake ones.” There was also WP Incubator, an “initiative for building cutting-edge AI products and new media business models.” Out of that came Ripple, which licenses opinion pieces from other newspapers, Substack writers, and various third parties. It has been widely derided as a knockoff of the kind of user-generated content that populates zombie sites like Forbes.com.
Perhaps no Lewis initiative was more indicative of his failures than the “third newsroom.”
The concept itself — which was later renamed WP Ventures — was actually relatively straightforward. It was meant to be a moneymaker outside the newsroom, which has certain ethical guidelines and journalistic standards that make it hard to sell what would otherwise be sponsored content, such as product placement or host-read ads. “The idea was to build a bunch of monetizable franchises that could live in that space and that we could then sell in a different capacity than we sell other Washington Post stuff,” says a former senior newsroom staffer.
But it fell victim to Lewis’s tendency to outline vague, grand visions without much substance or guidance to back them up — starting with the decision to suggest this initiative was on par with the Post’s actual newsroom (the first newsroom) and its opinion desk (the second newsroom, which would end up being overhauled into a champion of “personal liberties and free markets” after Bezos’s intervention in the 2024 election coverage).
The project, which officially launched in December 2024, ran into trouble right away, beginning with how it was structured. For months, the third newsroom reported partly to the business side and partly to the newsroom, so it remained inhibited by newsroom standards. Lewis was aware of the potential issue but seemed to brush it off, encouraging the project’s participants to just get going. Staffers imported from the main newsroom included those whose work lent itself to more commercial opportunities: video, audio, and service journalism. They started building out a different content stream that was more personality driven and social-first. Dave Jorgenson, the face of some of the Post’s TikTok and YouTube accounts, was seen as a big piece of this effort. But, confusingly, he was offered a buyout six months after the third newsroom was launched.
Jorgenson wasn’t the only casualty. As the third newsroom tried to get off the ground, executives became convinced that most of the existing video team couldn’t do the job. “People weren’t really given a genuine opportunity to train and pivot to the kind of video production that leadership said they wanted — shortform, YouTube series, video podcasting,” says a former senior newsroom staffer. The entire video team, more than 50 people, was offered buyouts.
WP Ventures ended up with a smaller staff and remit than anticipated, and the project soon lost momentum. “Getting the resources for the third newsroom and also the commitment to structure it in a way that could succeed never really happened,” says a former Post editor. It became clear that Lewis and his team didn’t know what they wanted to do, which created confusion for the people who ran the third newsroom as well as the staffers under them. The former editor says, “It was clear that they wanted it to be something different. But they hadn’t gotten to a place of having that conversation with anyone else other than being like, ‘We want to rename it again.’ It’s like, ‘Why?’”
It all went down in typically chaotic fashion. “When we were effectively telling folks that we were gutting the video team, Will was clearly not involved in enough of the strategy because he’d send messages to people who were no longer part of the strategy,” says a former senior newsroom staffer.
They explain, “There was a format we used to do a decent amount, longform mini-doc stuff. As part of the third-newsroom strategy, we’d made a concerted effort to say, ‘Our strategy doesn’t include this anymore; if you are interested in making these things, you should take a buyout.’ While that messaging was going out to the third newsroom and all those people in video, he’d be sending notes to people telling them how great the format was and what he liked about it. So just no alignment. Very confusing.”
By the time WP Ventures was moved fully outside the newsroom, the co-leader of the project, Krissah Thompson, had taken a buyout; her partner, Samantha Henig, left shortly after. The latest iteration of this unit is a “creator network,” run by Sara Goo. As of this fall, there were three staffers on the team.
By the summer of 2025, the whole company seemed caught in limbo. “I don’t understand who was driving the strategy toward the end,” says a former staffer. “I don’t know if it was Suzi, Matt, or Will.” Contrary to the popular perception that Bezos fired Lewis for showing up at the Super Bowl amid a round of devastating layoffs, it seems clear Bezos had lost confidence in Lewis’s leadership as early as the fall of 2025.
“They are really opposites,” says a senior editor. “Will is very big picture, vague, no specifics, no details, all strategy and vision, no tactics or execution. Doesn’t really make decisions. Doesn’t get his hands dirty. It’s just not his style of working. Whereas Bezos is very execution oriented, very tactically oriented, and very interested in evidence, data. The opposite of vague. That was the crux of how the November meeting went south with Will.”
“Whatever he did in London, I have no idea,” the editor adds. “But I know he did not know how to do this job.”
Toward the end of the year, Bezos conveyed he was seeking serious job cuts to balance the budget. The company had been gearing up for a round of layoffs in November, only to pull back at the last moment. The word from on high was that the layoffs weren’t sizable enough to “break even,” which had become Bezos’s demand. There has been rampant speculation in the media classes that Bezos is actively trying to destroy the Post as yet another sop to Trump, but executives and leaders I spoke to suggest that he has simply grown impatient with the lack of progress in overhauling the whole operation and putting it on new financial footing. Murray basically confirmed that impression in a February interview with Puck: “Over five years now, the Post has had a series of incremental moments — a couple of buyouts, a couple of trims, a couple of reorientations.” He added, “And we’re not where we need to be. So all of that led us to think we should take a much bigger action, as painful as it is.”
Though the cuts were Lewis’s last act as CEO, they are seen as bearing Murray’s fingerprints in terms of which desks were targeted (foreign, sports, local) and which largely spared (politics, national security, health and wellness). “He’s gained credibility in the eyes of the owner,” says one executive with knowledge of the process. “So when Matt says, ‘It’s time to reinvest, and here are the places to reinvest,’ Bezos will listen to him.”
Whether Murray, who didn’t respond to a request for an interview, has credibility with the staff is another matter. “He’s not suppressing Trump coverage,” one current reporter tells me. “Part of me feels like he’s this heat shield that’s absorbing all of this downward pressure and is still allowing a lot of good journalism to happen, but at the same time, he looks like he’s completely executing Bezos’s desires.”
In the interview with Puck, Murray admitted he didn’t know exactly how big the newsroom was after the layoffs, which one former executive calls “inexcusable.” There’s widespread concern about whether the Post, which was already struggling to turn things around, will be able to rejuvenate the paper with half the staff. Since the layoffs, some designers have been brought back on a short-term basis to help put out the physical paper until new software is implemented, according to a senior editor.
One senior newsroom staffer recalls the last conversation they had with Murray before leaving the Post. “He said, ‘I’m asking you to take a bet on me, and in some ways I’m taking a bet on myself,’ which is not what you want to hear. I’m all for self-awareness, but this place is crumbling. Who is going to figure out the plan? It was unclear who that person was.”
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Inside the Washington Post’s Existential Meltdown